If You Think Federal Employees in Washington Are Overpaid…

… Check out salaries at the United Nations. According to the U.S. envoy for UN Management and Reform, Joseph Torsella, UN salaries average out to $119,000 per year, and at UN headquarters in New York they are on average 30% higher than U.S. federal salaries in Washington.

The UN hasn’t figured much in the Republican debates, but surely those are numbers that would resonate with average American voters — who pay the biggest share of the bill for these average UN salaries.

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1.
Jack in Silver Spring

Ms. Rosett: I’m not goint to defend the UN, and, in fact, I think it makes the League of Nations look good, and if I had my druthers, I would abolish it. But the use of averages has no meaning without accounting for education, experience, location, responsibility and other factors. An example of how averages can be misleading is a comparison of average reading scores in Texas and Wisconsin for K-12. Texas has a lower average reading score in Texas than Wisconsin. When, though, each state’s reading scores are broken out by demographics – white, black and Hispanic – we find that whites in Texas have higher scores than whites in Wisconsin, and so do blacks in Texas compared to blacks in Wisconsin, and Hispanics in Texas compared to Hispanics in Wisconsin. You might ask, how is that possible? Well it turns out that in each state, whites have higher scores than Hispanics who have somewhat higher scores than blacks. (That is a value free statement.) The reason that Wisconsin’s AVERAGE reading score is higher is that it that it has a much lower percentage of Hispanics and blacks than does Texas. So, whites get a much heavier weight in the average in Wisconsin than do white in Texas.

Bottom line, for the kinds of comparisons you’re impling, you cannot use averages.

I have never seen the question asked or answered re: whether Federal employees continue to receive “Step” increases year over year, despite the frozen GS Schedule. If they continue to receive a “Step” increase for every year employed, these employees continue to see their pay increase annually, regardless of a frozen schedule. See http://www.opm.gov/oca/12tables/html/dcb.asp for the GS Schedule. [Note: The same would apply to SES schedules, etc...]